The Transcultural Bildungsroman: Education, Migration and the Construction of Masculinities in Arun Joshi’s The Foreigner (1968) and Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924)
Abstract
This essay offers a comparative analysis of Arun Joshi’s The Foreigner and Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. Both novels present acclaimed novels of formation negotiating masculinity alongside experiences of diaspora and exile. It will be argued that comparing the two novels makes a worthwhile contribution to the genre discussion of the bildungsroman because it illuminates hitherto unexplored narrative connections between Indian literature and German exile literature. While at first sight the celebrated Indo-English novelist Arun Joshi and the German Literature Nobel Prize laureate Thomas Mann have only little in common, a closer look reveals that the two writers not only shared the experience of living in-between various countries, continents and languages but that both men were deeply concerned with imagining and narrating the agony of loneliness and alienation in an increasingly globalised world. Like Mann’s Hans Castorp, Joshi’s protagonist Sindi Oberoi grows up orphaned and spending his youth abroad. Whilst the two male protagonists have a professional background in engineering, their attempts to engineer their own lives get somewhat out of control when they engage in morbid love affairs. As if this was not enough, and like ‘true’ companions in fate, Hans and Sindi eventually have to come to terms with the deaths of their bosom-friends. Decay and death are thus central motifs in both novels. This is not only reflected in the vibrant representations of numerous places but is vividly displayed in the young protagonists’ detached views of life. Yet despite these similarities, the novels are also marked by differences in the way they construct and narrate masculinity, sexuality and transcultural existentialist identity formation. Hence, the emerging narrative panorama of the genre of the transcultural bildungsroman includes, in addition to a postcolonial and transcultural existentialist version, a homoerotic parody of the genre.
- 1
Between 1871 and 1919 Danzig belonged to the German Empire, however, after the Great War and in accordance with the Treaty of Versailles the city was turned into an independent state in 1920.
Works Cited
Appadurai, Arjun (1991). “Global Ethnoscapes: Notes and Queries for a Transnational Anthropology.” Richard G. Fox, ed. Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research, 191–210.Suche in Google Scholar
Appadurai, Arjun (2000). Modernity at Large. London: University of Minnesota Press.Suche in Google Scholar
Alexander, Vera (2006). Transcultural Representations of Migration and Education in South Asian Anglophone Novels. Trier: WVT.Suche in Google Scholar
Boes, Tobias (2006). “Modernist Studies and the Bildungsroman: A Historical Survey of Critical Trends.” Literature Compass 3.2, 230–43.10.1111/j.1741-4113.2006.00303.xSuche in Google Scholar
Boes, Tobias (2012). Formative Fictions: Nationalism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Bildungsroman. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press10.7591/cornell/9780801451775.001.0001Suche in Google Scholar
Böhm, Karl Werner (1984). “Die homosexuellen Elemente in Thomas Manns Der Zauberberg.” Literatur für Leser 3, 171–90.Suche in Google Scholar
Chambers, Iain (1995). Migrancy, Culture, Identity. London: Routledge.Suche in Google Scholar
Clifford, James (1988). The Predicament of Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.10.2307/j.ctvjf9x0hSuche in Google Scholar
Dilthey, Wilhelm (1906). Poetry and Experience. Ed. and trans. Rudolf A. Makkreeland and Frithjof Rodi. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Suche in Google Scholar
Guruprasad, Thakur (1986). “The Lost Lonely Questers of Arun Joshi’s Fiction.” R.K. Dhawan, ed. The Fictional World Arun Joshi. New Delhi: Classical Books, 155–67.Suche in Google Scholar
Härle, Gerhard (1986). Die Gestalt des Schönen. Untersuchung zur Homosexualitätsthematik in Thomas Manns Roman ‘Der Zauberberg.’ Königstein im Taunus: Hain Verlag bei Athenäum.Suche in Google Scholar
Helff, Sissy (2013). “Growing Up in Transcultural Diasporic Words.” Unreliable Truths: Transcultural Homeworlds in Indian Diasporic Writing. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 107–46.Suche in Google Scholar
Iser, Wolfgang (1993). The Fictive and the Imaginary. Baltimore, Maryland: John Hopkins University Press.10.56021/9780801844980Suche in Google Scholar
Iyer, Pico (2001). The Global Soul: Jet-Lag, Shopping Malls and the Search for Home. London: Bloomsbury.Suche in Google Scholar
Joshi, Arun (1993 [1968]). The Foreigner. New Delhi: Orient Paperbacks.Suche in Google Scholar
Kontje, Todd Curtis (1993). The German Bildungsroman: History of a National Genre. Columbia, SC: Camden House.Suche in Google Scholar
Kumar, Shankar (2003). The Novels of Arun Joshi: A Critical Study. New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers.Suche in Google Scholar
Mann, Thomas (1987 [1924]). Der Zauberberg [The Magic Mountain]. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag.Suche in Google Scholar
Martini, Fritz (1961). “Der Bildungsroman. Zur Geschichte des Wortes und der Theorie.” DVjs 35, 44–63.10.1007/BF03375276Suche in Google Scholar
Meyers, Jeffrey (1977). Homosexuality and Literature 1890–1930. London and Atlantic Highlands, NY: Athlone Press.10.2307/j.ctt1w6tbmhSuche in Google Scholar
Minden, Michael (1997). “Der Zauberberg.” The German Bildungsroman: Incest and Inheritance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 205–44.Suche in Google Scholar
Moretti, Franco (1987). The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture. London: Verso.Suche in Google Scholar
Moretti, Franco (2003). “More Conjectures.” New Left Review 20, 73–81.Suche in Google Scholar
Morgenstern, Karl (1817). “Bruchstück einer den 12/24 Dec 1819 zu Dorpat im Hauptsaal der Kaiserl. Universität öffentlich gehaltenen Vorlesung über den Geist und Zusammenhang einer Reihe philosophischer Romane.” Karl Morgenstern, ed. Dörptsche Beyträge für Freunde der Philosophie, Litteratur und Kunst. Dorpat und Leipzig, 180–95.Suche in Google Scholar
Raizada, Harish (1986). “Double Vision of Fantasy and Reality in Arun Joshi’s Novels.” R.K. Dhawan, ed. The Fictional World Arun Joshi. New Delhi: Classical Books, 69–103.Suche in Google Scholar
Sammons, Jeffrey L. (1981). “The Mystery of the Missing Bildungsroman, or: What Happened to Wilhelm Meister’s Legacy?” Genre 14.2, 229–46.Suche in Google Scholar
Saine, Thomas P. (1991). “Was Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre Really Supposed to Be a Bildungsroman?” James Hardin, ed. Reflection and Action: Essays on the Bildungsroman. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 118–41.Suche in Google Scholar
Schulze-Engler, Frank (2000). “Literature in the Global Ecumene of Modernity: Amitav Ghosh’s The Circle of Reason and In an Antique Land.” Heinz Antor and Klaus Stiersdorfer, eds. English Literatures in International Contexts. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 375–6.Suche in Google Scholar
Schulze-Engler, Frank and Sissy Helff, eds. (2008). Transcultural English Studies: Theories: Fictions, Realities. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi.10.1163/9789042028845Suche in Google Scholar
Selbmann, Rolf (1994). Der deutsche Bildungsroman. Stuttgart: Metzler.10.1007/978-3-476-04101-2Suche in Google Scholar
Sharma, Siddhartha (2004). Arun Joshi’s Novels: A Critical Study. Atlantic Publishers.Suche in Google Scholar
Sicker, Philip (1986). “Babel Revisited: Mann’s Myth of Language in The Magic Mountain,” Mosaic 19.2, 1–20.Suche in Google Scholar
Singh, R.A. (1999). “Man and Destiny: a Study of Arun Joshi’s The Foreigner.” R.A. Singh, V.L. V.N. Narendra Kumar, eds. Critical Studies on Indian Fiction in English. New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers, 131–3.Suche in Google Scholar
Thesz, Nicole A. (2006). “Thomas Mann und Die Welt vor dem großen Kriege: Abgrenzung und Dialektik auf dem Zauberberg.” Monatshefte 98.3, 384–400.10.3368/m.XCVIII.3.384Suche in Google Scholar
Trimbakrao, Malshette Yogesh and Shete Sonali Shivraj (2012). “A Critical Study of Arun Joshi’s The Foreigner.” The Criterion: An International Journal in English 3.2 <www.the-criterion.com> (September 10, 2013).Suche in Google Scholar
Vatsa, Shivani and Rashmi Gaur (2001). “The Concept of Humane Technology in Arun Joshi’s The Foreigner.” M.K. Bhatnagar, ed. The Novels of Arun Joshi: A Critical Study. New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers, 28–41.Suche in Google Scholar
Welsch, Wolfgang (1996). Grenzgänge der Ästhetik. Stuttgart: Reclam.Suche in Google Scholar
©2014 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Editorial
- Articles
- Arun Joshi: Avant-Garde, Existentialism and the West
- Nietzsche’s Judgement: The Case of Morality in Arun Joshi’s The Apprentice
- The Transcultural Bildungsroman: Education, Migration and the Construction of Masculinities in Arun Joshi’s The Foreigner (1968) and Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924)
- Narrative Id/entity in Arun Joshi’s The Strange Case of Billy Biswas
- A Postmodern Na(rra)tion of an Indian (Hi)Story: An Analysis of Arun Joshi’s The Apprentice
- Peripheral Identities and Hybridity in Arun Joshi’s The City and the River
- Book Reviews
- Musik in Literatur und Poetik des Modernism: Lowell, Pound, Woolf
- Zur Schreibkunst von William Blake: Ästhetische Souveränität und politische Imagination
- Inheritance Law and Political Theology in Shakespeare and Milton: Election and Grace as Constitutional in Early Modern Literature and Beyond
- Englischunterricht. Grundlagen und Methoden einer handlungsorientierten Unterrichtspraxis
- Transnational Gothic. Literary and Social Exchanges in the Long Nineteenth Century
- Books Received
- Books Received
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Editorial
- Articles
- Arun Joshi: Avant-Garde, Existentialism and the West
- Nietzsche’s Judgement: The Case of Morality in Arun Joshi’s The Apprentice
- The Transcultural Bildungsroman: Education, Migration and the Construction of Masculinities in Arun Joshi’s The Foreigner (1968) and Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924)
- Narrative Id/entity in Arun Joshi’s The Strange Case of Billy Biswas
- A Postmodern Na(rra)tion of an Indian (Hi)Story: An Analysis of Arun Joshi’s The Apprentice
- Peripheral Identities and Hybridity in Arun Joshi’s The City and the River
- Book Reviews
- Musik in Literatur und Poetik des Modernism: Lowell, Pound, Woolf
- Zur Schreibkunst von William Blake: Ästhetische Souveränität und politische Imagination
- Inheritance Law and Political Theology in Shakespeare and Milton: Election and Grace as Constitutional in Early Modern Literature and Beyond
- Englischunterricht. Grundlagen und Methoden einer handlungsorientierten Unterrichtspraxis
- Transnational Gothic. Literary and Social Exchanges in the Long Nineteenth Century
- Books Received
- Books Received
